ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the public, political and media reaction to the release of a New Zealand sex offender in 2012 and the subsequent measures that were taken to permanently exclude from society. The longing for security in the age of mobility has led to demands that those who put this at risk must be immobilized themselves. This can be achieved by more extensive use of the prison, but immobilization extends beyond this into public space as well, leading to a transformation of some of the conditions, routines and expectations of everyday life itself, both for potential offenders and all their possible victims. The authorization and routinization of violence by the state was allowed to become a normal feature of everyday life, alongside the dehumanization of its victims in public discourse: the only legitimate way to describe them came to be in terms of some form of sub-human species or other.
